Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: "chilling academic freedom"

From the FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN EDUCATION: "FIRE’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of liberty."

Peter Bonilla (FIRE): ... it’s worth visiting the case of Stephen Hsu at Michigan State University. His case is more sobering, because the campaign succeeded in forcing his resignation as MSU’s Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. (Hsu, a theoretical physicist, remains on MSU’s tenured faculty.) Hsu was brought down in significant part by the pressure on MSU generated by a Twitter thread and accompanying petition by MSU’s Graduate Employees Union, which cobbled together a string of decontextualized, condensed remarks on genetics and intelligence to brand Hsu “a vocal scientific racist and eugenicist.”

Hsu rebutted the claims in a post on his personal blog, accusing the petitioners of acting in bad faith. He had a point. Apart from the fact that Twitter is a woefully inadequate forum to debate intricate matters of science (or even to accurately characterize them), some of the claims against Hsu are dishonest on their face. To highlight one example, the GEU seized on the fact that a study supported in part through his office’s funding (Hsu oversaw research expenditures of roughly $700 million) suggested that there was no widespread racial bias in police shootings. GEU characterized this by saying that “Hsu’s office appears to have directed funding to research downplaying racism in bias in police shootings,” implying that this was his very goal. This is a striking charge to make against a scientist’s integrity without presenting any evidence; it’s also simply not how scientific inquiry works.

The claims against Hsu alleged no concrete misconduct or malfeasance in carrying out his administrative duties; rather, they amalgamated a disparate set of remarks, attributed the least charitable set of motives to his making them, and stated that someone holding those purported beliefs was per se unfit to hold his position. Unfortunately, MSU went for it. On June 19, MSU president Samuel Stanley demanded, and received, Hsu’s resignation as VP.

Spillover effects on academic freedom

The president of MSU’s Graduate Employees Union cheerfully expressed the opinion that the Hsu episode should have no chilling effect on academic freedom, because the GEU only sought to have Hsu removed from his administrative position and not from the tenured faculty. To be sure, there are significant differences between the two propositions, and administrators are generally considered at-will employees who can be fired any time. (Administrator cases are also outside the scope of FIRE’s mission of defending student and faculty rights.). But from someone who’d just helped mount a successful campaign that worked in part by declaring a range of opinions on certain issues effectively outside the bounds of legitimate academic inquiry, this assertion is laughable.

Faculty will most certainly take note of the actions colleges take against administrators, note the implications they may have for academic freedom, and adjust accordingly. Universities may not be so easily able to rid themselves of tenured faculty members, but several years of faculty cases suggest that universities can be quite willing to override faculty governance for the purposes of pursuing discipline (including termination and loss of tenure) against faculty for speech demonstrably protected by their academic freedom. ...

Media coverage:

A Twitter Mob Takes Down an Administrator at Michigan State (Wall Street Journal June 25)

Scholar forced to resign over study that found police shootings not biased against blacks (The College Fix)

On Steve Hsu and the Campaign to Thwart Free Inquiry (Quillette)

Michigan State University VP of Research Ousted (Reason Magazine, Eugene Volokh, UCLA)

Research isn’t advocacy (NY Post Editorial Board)

Podcast interview on Tom Woods show (July 2)

College professor forced to resign for citing study that found police shootings not biased against blacks (Law Enforcement Today, July 5)

"Racist" College Researcher Ousted After Sharing Study Showing No Racial Bias In Police Shootings (ZeroHedge, July 6)

Twitter mob: College researcher forced to resign after study finding no racial bias in police shootings (Reclaim the Net, July 8)

Horowitz: Asian-American researcher fired from Michigan State administration for advancing facts about police shootings (The Blaze, July 8)

I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It: If scientists retract research that challenges reigning orthodoxies, politics will drive scholarship (Wall Street Journal July 8)

Conservative author cites research on police shootings and race. Researchers ask for its retraction in response (The College Fix, July 8)

Academics Seek to Retract Study Disproving Racist Police Shootings After Conservative Cites It (Hans Bader, CNSNews, July 9)

The Ideological Corruption of Science (theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss in the Wall Street Journal, July 12)

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: "chilling academic freedom" (Peter Bonilla, July 22)

The Ideological Corruption of Science (Lawrence Krauss in the Wall Street Journal)

Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss writes in the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, deconstructionism was in vogue in the English Department. We in the science departments would scoff at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, epitomized by a movement that argued against the existence of objective truth itself, arguing that all such claims to knowledge were tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.

It could never happen in the hard sciences, except perhaps under dictatorships, such as the Nazi condemnation of “Jewish” science, or the Stalinist campaign against genetics led by Trofim Lysenko, in which literally thousands of mainstream geneticists were dismissed in the effort to suppress any opposition to the prevailing political view of the state.

Or so we thought. In recent years, and especially since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to “cultural studies” journals to guide their disciplines, to censor dissenting views, to remove faculty from leadership positions if their research is claimed by opponents to support systemic oppression.

... At Michigan State University, one group used the strike to organize and coordinate a protest campaign against the vice president for research, physicist Stephen Hsu, whose crimes included doing research on computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability—something that to the protesters smacked of eugenics. He was also accused of supporting psychology research at MSU on the statistics of police shootings that didn’t clearly support claims of racial bias. Within a week, the university president forced Mr. Hsu to resign.

... Shortly after Mr. Hsu resigned, the authors of the psychology study asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science to retract their paper—not because of flaws in their statistical analysis, but because of what they called the “misuse” of their article by journalists who argued that it countered the prevailing view that police forces are racist. They later amended the retraction request to claim, conveniently, that it “had nothing to do with political considerations, ‘mob’ pressure, threats to the authors, or distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly.” As a cosmologist, I can say that if we retracted all the papers in cosmology that we felt were misrepresented by journalists, there would hardly be any papers left.

Actual censorship is also occurring. A distinguished chemist in Canada argued in favor of merit-based science and against hiring practices that aim at equality of outcome if they result “in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.” For that he was censured by his university provost, his published review article on research and education in organic synthesis was removed from the journal website, and two editors involved in accepting it were suspended.

An Italian scientist at the international laboratory CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, had his scheduled seminar on statistical imbalances between the sexes in physics canceled and his position at the laboratory revoked because he suggested that apparent inequities might not be directly due to sexism. A group of linguistics students initiated a public petition asking that the psychologist Steven Pinker be stripped of his position as a Linguistics Society of America Fellow for such offenses as tweeting a New York Times article they disapproved of.

Whenever science has been corrupted by falling prey to ideology, scientific progress suffers. This was the case in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—and in the U.S. in the 19th century when racist views dominated biology, and during the McCarthy era, when prominent scientists like Robert Oppenheimer were ostracized for their political views. To stem the slide, scientific leaders, scientific societies and senior academic administrators must publicly stand up not only for free speech in science, but for quality, independent of political doctrine and divorced from the demands of political factions.

Mr. Krauss a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Physics of Climate Change,” forthcoming in January.

Media coverage:

A Twitter Mob Takes Down an Administrator at Michigan State (Wall Street Journal June 25)

Scholar forced to resign over study that found police shootings not biased against blacks (The College Fix)

On Steve Hsu and the Campaign to Thwart Free Inquiry (Quillette)

Michigan State University VP of Research Ousted (Reason Magazine, Eugene Volokh, UCLA)

Research isn’t advocacy (NY Post Editorial Board)

Podcast interview on Tom Woods show (July 2)

College professor forced to resign for citing study that found police shootings not biased against blacks (Law Enforcement Today, July 5)

"Racist" College Researcher Ousted After Sharing Study Showing No Racial Bias In Police Shootings (ZeroHedge, July 6)

Twitter mob: College researcher forced to resign after study finding no racial bias in police shootings (Reclaim the Net, July 8)

Horowitz: Asian-American researcher fired from Michigan State administration for advancing facts about police shootings (The Blaze, July 8)

I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It: If scientists retract research that challenges reigning orthodoxies, politics will drive scholarship (Wall Street Journal July 8)

Conservative author cites research on police shootings and race. Researchers ask for its retraction in response (The College Fix, July 8)

Academics Seek to Retract Study Disproving Racist Police Shootings After Conservative Cites It (Hans Bader, CNSNews, July 9)

The Ideological Corruption of Science (theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss in the Wall Street Journal, July 12)

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: "chilling academic freedom" (Peter Bonilla, July 22)

Twitter Attacks, and a Defense of Scientific Inquiry

I have not responded to these nasty Twitter attacks, but unfortunately they have gotten enough traction that I feel I need to respond now. [ Note: I have been informed that some of the signatures on their petition are fake, including one purported to be from my colleague Corey Washington! See counter petition and support letters on my behalf. ]

The attacks attempt to depict me as a racist and sexist, using short video clips out of context, and also by misrepresenting the content of some of my blog posts. A cursory inspection reveals bad faith in their presentation.

The accusations are entirely false -- I am neither racist nor sexist.

The Twitter mobs want to suppress scientific work that they find objectionable. What is really at stake: academic freedom, open discussion of important ideas, scientific inquiry. All are imperiled and all must be defended.


One of the video clips is taken from an interview I did with YouTuber Stefan Molyneux in 2017. Molyneux was not a controversial figure in 2017, although he has since become one. Prominent scientists working on human intelligence who were interviewed on his show around the same time include James Flynn and Eric Turkheimer. (Noam Chomsky was also a guest some time after I was.) Here is what I said to Molyneux about genetic group differences in intelligence:



Here is a similar interview I did with Cambridge University PhD student Daphne Martschenko:



As you can see, contrary to the Twitter accusations (lies), I do not endorse claims of genetic group differences. In fact I urge great caution in this area.


The tweets also criticize two podcasts I recorded with my co-host Corey Washington: a discussion with a prominent MSU Psychology professor who studies police shootings (this discussion has elicited a strong response due to the tragic death of George Floyd), and with Claude Steele, a renowned African American researcher who discovered Stereotype Threat and has been Provost at Columbia and Berkeley. The conversation with Steele is a nuanced discussion of race, discrimination, and education in America.






The blog posts under attack, dating back over a decade, are almost all discussions of published scientific papers by leading scholars in Psychology, Neuroscience, Genomics, Machine Learning, and other fields. The papers are published in journals like Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. However, a detailed reading is required to judge the research and related inferences. I maintain that all the work described is well-motivated and potentially important. Certainly worthy of a blog post. (I have written several thousand blog posts; apparently these are the most objectionable out of those thousands!)

In several of the blog posts I explicitly denounce racism and discrimination based on identity.


This paper, from 2008, discusses early capability to ascertain ancestry from gene sequence. The topic was highly controversial in 2008 (subject to political attack, because it suggested there could be a genetic basis for “race”), but the science is correct. It is now common for people to investigate their heritage using DNA samples (23andMe, Ancestry) using exactly these methods. This case provides a perfect example of science that faced suppression for political reasons, but has since been developed for many useful applications.

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html


This 2016 paper is by the UCSD Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics collaboration. They claim that fMRI features of brain morphology can be predicted by genetic ancestry via machine learning.

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/03/genetic-ancestry-and-brain-morphology.html


These blog posts discuss the firing of software engineer James Damore by Google over a memo on diversity practices. The first post describes the legal situation and quotes a professor of labor law at Notre Dame. The second compares the claims made in Damore’s memo to an article in the Stanford Medical School magazine, which covers similar material and was (by coincidence) published around the same time.

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/08/damore-vs-google-trial-of-century.html
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/08/meanwhile-down-on-farm.html


These papers discuss evidence from large DNA datasets for recent natural selection in human evolution. This research has been attacked for political reasons, but should be defended since it addresses fundamental questions in deep human history and evolution.

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-truth-shall-make-you-free.html


Regarding my work as Vice President for Research, the numbers speak for themselves. MSU went from roughly $500M in annual research expenditures to about $700M during my tenure. We have often been ranked #1 in the Big Ten for research growth. I participated in the recruitment of numerous prominent female and minority professors, in fields like Precision Medicine, Genomics, Chemistry, and many others. Until this Twitter attack there has been not even a single allegation (over 8 years) of bias or discrimination on my part in promotion and tenure or faculty recruitment. These are two activities at the heart of the modern research university, involving hundreds of individuals each year.

Academics and scientists must not submit to mob rule.


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Media coverage:

A Twitter Mob Takes Down an Administrator at Michigan State (Wall Street Journal June 25)

Scholar forced to resign over study that found police shootings not biased against blacks (The College Fix)

On Steve Hsu and the Campaign to Thwart Free Inquiry (Quillette)

Michigan State University VP of Research Ousted (Reason Magazine, Eugene Volokh, UCLA)

Research isn’t advocacy (NY Post Editorial Board)

Podcast interview on Tom Woods show (July 2)

College professor forced to resign for citing study that found police shootings not biased against blacks (Law Enforcement Today, July 5)

"Racist" College Researcher Ousted After Sharing Study Showing No Racial Bias In Police Shootings (ZeroHedge, July 6)

Twitter mob: College researcher forced to resign after study finding no racial bias in police shootings (Reclaim the Net, July 8)

Horowitz: Asian-American researcher fired from Michigan State administration for advancing facts about police shootings (The Blaze, July 8)

I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It: If scientists retract research that challenges reigning orthodoxies, politics will drive scholarship (Wall Street Journal July 8)

Conservative author cites research on police shootings and race. Researchers ask for its retraction in response (The College Fix, July 8)

Academics Seek to Retract Study Disproving Racist Police Shootings After Conservative Cites It (Hans Bader, CNSNews, July 9)

The Ideological Corruption of Science (theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss in the Wall Street Journal, July 12)

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: "chilling academic freedom" (Peter Bonilla, July 22)

The Truth Shall Make You Free

Note Added in response to 2020 Twitter mob attack which attempts to misrepresent my views: This is not my research. I do not work on population structure or group differences in genomics. I also do not work on signals for recent natural selection. The post below discusses whether researchers should be forced to abandon important lines of investigation because of moral panics caused by misunderstanding of their results. What I told NYT reporter Amy Harmon at the time: These are serious, well-meaning researchers. You can't sensationalize their work and then force them to make loyalty pledges.

Racist inferences based on the results are the fault of the reader, not the authors of the papers or of this blog.

These NYTimes articles by Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Harmon, linking genetic science to racism and white supremacy, caused a sensation at ASHG 2018, a large annual meeting of genetics researchers.

Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed)

‘Could Somebody Please Debunk This?’: Writing About Science When Even the Scientists Are Nervous

Geneticists Criticize Use of Science by White Nationalists to Justify ‘Racial Purity’

In the second article above, Harmon writes

But another reason some scientists avoid engaging on this topic, I came to understand, was that they do not have definitive answers about whether there are average differences in biological traits across populations. And they have increasingly powerful tools to try to detect how natural selection may have acted differently on the genes that contribute to assorted traits in various populations.

What’s more, some believe substantial differences will be found. ...

The first talk I attended at ASHG this year is summarized below. The talk was oversubscribed, so I had to sit in the overflow room. One of the slides presented showed a table of specific complex traits, cross-referenced by different ancestry groups, indicating status of recent natural selection. The authors' results imply that different population groups have been experiencing differential selection over the last ~10k years: different selection pressures in different geographical locations. There were many talks at ASHG covering related topics, with similar conclusions. Advances in computational and statistical methods, together with large datasets, make it possible now to seriously investigate differential selection in recent human evolutionary history.

Given such results, how are researchers to respond when asked to categorically exclude the possibility of genetically mediated average differences between groups? 

We are scientists, seeking truth. We are not slaves to ideological conformity.

Building genealogies for tens of thousands of individuals genome-wide identifies evidence of directional selection driving many complex human traits.

S.R. Myers 1,2; L. Speidel 1
1) Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; 2) Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

For a variety of species, large-scale genetic variation datasets are now available. All observed genetic variation can be traced back to a genealogy, which records historical recombination and coalescence events and in principle captures all available information about evolutionary processes. However, the reconstruction of these genealogies has been impossible for modern-scale data, due to huge inherent computational challenges. As a consequence, existing methods usually scale to no more than tens of samples. We have developed a new, computationally efficient method for inferring genome-wide genealogies accounting for varying population sizes and recombination hotspots, robust to data errors, and applicable to thousands of samples genome-wide in many species. This method is >10,000 times faster than existing approaches, and more accurate than leading algorithms for a range of tasks including estimating mutational ages and inferring historical population sizes. Application to 2,478 present-day humans in the 1000 Genomes Project, and wild mice, provides dates for population size changes, merges, splits and introgressions, and identifies changes in underlying evolutionary mutation rates, from 1000 years, to more than 1 million years, ago. Using our mutational age estimates, we developed an approach quantifying evidence of natural selection at each SNP. We compared resulting p-values to existing GWAS study results, finding widespread enrichment (>2.5-fold in Europeans and East Asians) of GWAS hits among individual SNPs with low selection p-values (Z>6), stronger than the 1.5-fold increase observed at nonsynonymous mutations, and with enrichment increasing with statistical significance. We found evidence that directional selection, impacting many SNPs jointly, has shaped the evolution of >50 human traits over the past 1,000-50,000 years, sometimes in different directions among different groups. These include many blood-related traits including blood pressure, platelet volume, both red and white blood cell count and e.g. monocyte counts; educational attainment; age at menarche; and physical traits including skin colour, body mass index and (particularly in South Asian populations) height. Our approach enables simultaneous testing of recent selection, ancient natural selection, and changes in the strength of selection on a trait through time, and is applicable across a wide range of organisms.

Of course, all good people abhor racism. I believe that each person should be treated as an individual, independent of ancestry or ethnic background. (Hence I oppose Harvard's race-based discrimination against Asian Americans and favor Caltech's meritocratic approach to admissions.)

However, this ethical position is not predicated on the absence of average differences between groups. I believe that basic human rights and human dignity derive from our shared humanity, not from uniformity in ability or genetic makeup.

As a parent it is obvious to me that my children differ in innate aptitudes, preferences, and personalities. I love them equally: it would be wrong to condition this love on their specific genetic endowments.

Here is another set of ASHG talks I attended, on related issues:

Impact of Natural Selection on the Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits

Moderators: Shamil Sunyaev, Harvard Med Sch & Brigham & Women’s Hosp, Boston
Laura Hayward, Columbia Univ, New York

Evolution and maintenance of complex traits under natural selection has been a long-standing area of genetic research. Polygenic adaptation, stabilizing selection, and negative selection on new mutations can substantially impact the genetic architecture of diseases and complex traits, via direct selection on traits that are correlated with fitness and/or via pleiotropic selection. New methods are being developed to detect the action of natural selection at different time scales, including selection in contemporary humans. This session will discuss recent work on methods that analyze data from large cohorts to detect natural selection and evaluate its impact on diseases and complex traits. The application of these methods has substantially improved our understanding of polygenic disease and complex trait architectures, informing efforts to identify and interpret genetic variation affecting diseases and complex traits.

10:30 AM Polygenic architecture and adaptation of human complex traits. J. Pritchard. Howard Hughes Med Inst, Stanford.

11:00 AM Detection and quantification of the effect of selection and adaptation on complex traits. P. Visscher. Univ Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

11:30 AM Observing natural selection in contemporary humans. M. Ilardo. Univ Utah & UC Berkeley.

12:00 PM Impact of negative selection on common variant disease architectures. A. Price. Harvard TH Chan Sch Publ Hlth, Boston.

More papers on recent natural selection and human complex traits:

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/10/genetic-group-differences-in-height.html

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/05/evidence-for-very-recent-natural.html

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/06/complex-trait-adaptation-and-branching.html

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/07/natural-selection-and-body-shape-in.html

Genetics and Group Differences: David Reich (Harvard) in NYTimes

Harvard geneticist David Reich writes below in the New York Times. The prospect that human ancestry clusters ("races") might differ in allele frequencies, leading to quantifiable group differences, has been looming for a long time. Reich writes

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position.

See Metric on the space of genomes (2007), Human genetic variation and Lewontin's fallacy in pictures (2008), and What's New Since Montagu? (2014).

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

By David Reich

March 23, 2018

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.

The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases. For example, we now know that genetic factors help explain why northern Europeans are taller on average than southern Europeans, why multiple sclerosis is more common in European-Americans than in African-Americans, and why the reverse is true for end-stage kidney disease.

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.

To get a sense of what modern genetic research into average biological differences across populations looks like, consider an example from my own work. Beginning around 2003, I began exploring whether the population mixture that has occurred in the last few hundred years in the Americas could be leveraged to find risk factors for prostate cancer, a disease that occurs 1.7 times more often in self-identified African-Americans than in self-identified European-Americans. This disparity had not been possible to explain based on dietary and environmental differences, suggesting that genetic factors might play a role.

Self-identified African-Americans turn out to derive, on average, about 80 percent of their genetic ancestry from enslaved Africans brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries. My colleagues and I searched, in 1,597 African-American men with prostate cancer, for locations in the genome where the fraction of genes contributed by West African ancestors was larger than it was elsewhere in the genome. In 2006, we found exactly what we were looking for: a location in the genome with about 2.8 percent more African ancestry than the average.

When we looked in more detail, we found that this region contained at least seven independent risk factors for prostate cancer, all more common in West Africans. Our findings could fully account for the higher rate of prostate cancer in African-Americans than in European-Americans. We could conclude this because African-Americans who happen to have entirely European ancestry in this small section of their genomes had about the same risk for prostate cancer as random Europeans.

Did this research rely on terms like “African-American” and “European-American” that are socially constructed, and did it label segments of the genome as being probably “West African” or “European” in origin? Yes. Did this research identify real risk factors for disease that differ in frequency across those populations, leading to discoveries with the potential to improve health and save lives? Yes.

While most people will agree that finding a genetic explanation for an elevated rate of disease is important, they often draw the line there. Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another.

But whether we like it or not, that line has already been crossed. A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.

It is not yet clear how these genetic variations operate. A follow-up study of Icelanders led by the geneticist Augustine Kong showed that these genetic variations also nudge people who carry them to delay having children. So these variations may be explaining longer times at school by affecting a behavior that has nothing to do with intelligence.

This study has been joined by others finding genetic predictors of behavior. One of these, led by the geneticist Danielle Posthuma, studied more than 70,000 people and found genetic variations in more than 20 genes that were predictive of performance on intelligence tests.

Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly. And since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.

You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.

To understand why it is so dangerous for geneticists and anthropologists to simply repeat the old consensus about human population differences, consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating. Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.

One of Mr. Wade’s key sources, for example, is the anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has asserted that people of sub-Saharan African ancestry have no propensity to work when they don’t have to because, he claims, they did not go through the type of natural selection for hard work in the last thousands of years that some Eurasians did. There is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement. Indeed, as 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.

Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.

At a meeting a few years later, Dr. Watson said to me and my fellow geneticist Beth Shapiro something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He asserted that Jews were high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars, and that East Asian students tended to be conformist because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society. (Contacted recently, Dr. Watson denied having made these statements, maintaining that they do not represent his views; Dr. Shapiro said that her recollection matched mine.)

What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes. They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.

This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.

So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.

For me, a natural response to the challenge is to learn from the example of the biological differences that exist between males and females. The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material — a Y chromosome that males have and that females don’t, and a second X chromosome that females have and males don’t.

Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound. In addition to anatomical differences, men and women exhibit average differences in size and physical strength. (There are also average differences in temperament and behavior, though there are important unresolved questions about the extent to which these differences are influenced by social expectations and upbringing.)

How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.

It is clear from the inequities that persist between women and men in our society that fulfilling these aspirations in practice is a challenge. Yet conceptually it is straightforward. And if this is the case with men and women, then it is surely the case with whatever differences we may find among human populations, the great majority of which will be far less profound.

An abiding challenge for our civilization is to treat each human being as an individual and to empower all people, regardless of what hand they are dealt from the deck of life. Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller, so it should be only a modest challenge to accommodate a reality in which the average genetic contributions to human traits differ.

It is important to face whatever science will reveal without prejudging the outcome and with the confidence that we can be mature enough to handle any findings. Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.

David Reich is a professor of genetics at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming book “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” from which this article is adapted.

This is a recent Reich lecture with the same title as his forthcoming book.

Dalton Conley: The Bell Curve Revisited and The Genome Factor

Dalton Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is unique in having earned a second PhD in behavior genetics after his first in Sociology.

In the talk and paper below he discusses molecular genetic tests of three hypotheses from Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. This much vilified book is indeed about intelligence and class structure, but almost entirely not about race. Racial differences in intelligence are only discussed in one chapter, and the authors do not make strong claims as to whether the causes for these differences are genetic or environmental. (They do leave open the possibility of a genetic cause for part of the gap, which has led to all kinds of trouble for the surviving author, Charles Murray.) The three questions addressed by Dalton do not involve race.

Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield organized a panel to commemorate the 20th anniversary of The Bell Curve back in 2014. You can find the video here.

1. How is it that the "core propositions" of The Bell Curve can be discussed in a paper published in Sociological Science and at an advanced seminar at Princeton, but Charles Murray is not allowed to speak at Middlebury College?

2. There must be many social scientists or academics in the humanities (or undergraduates at Middlebury) with strong opinions about The Bell Curve, despite never having read it, and despite having a completely erroneous understanding of what the book is about. If you are one of these people, shouldn't you feel embarrassed or ashamed?

The Bell Curve Revisited: Testing Controversial Hypotheses with Molecular Genetic Data

Dalton Conley, Benjamin Domingue

Sociological Science, July 5, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a23

In 1994, the publication of Herrnstein’s and Murray’s The Bell Curve resulted in a social science maelstrom of responses. In the present study, we argue that Herrnstein’s and Murray’s assertions were made prematurely, on their own terms, given the lack of data available to test the role of genotype in the dynamics of achievement and attainment in U.S. society. Today, however, the scientific community has access to at least one dataset that is nationally representative and has genome-wide molecular markers. We deploy those data from the Health and Retirement Study in order to test the core series of propositions offered by Herrnstein and Murray in 1994. First, we ask whether the effect of genotype is increasing in predictive power across birth cohorts in the middle twentieth century. Second, we ask whether assortative mating on relevant genotypes is increasing across the same time period. Finally, we ask whether educational genotypes are increasingly predictive of fertility (number ever born [NEB]) in tandem with the rising (negative) association of educational outcomes and NEB. The answers to these questions are mostly no; while molecular genetic markers can predict educational attainment, we find little evidence for the proposition that we are becoming increasingly genetically stratified.

While I find the work described above to be commendable (i.e., it foreshadows how molecular genetic methods will eventually address even the most complex and controversial topics in social science), I don't feel that the conclusions reached are beyond question. For example, see this worthwhile comment at the journal web page:

This is a fascinating study! My comments below pertain to Proposition #1, that “The effect of genetic endowment is increasing over time with the rise of a meritocratic society”.

The data reported here do not seem to unequivocally contravene H&M’s hypothesis. The authors focus on the interaction terms, PGS x Birth Year (i.e. cohort), and show that interaction coefficient is slightly negative (b=-0.006, p=0.47), indicating a weakening of the association between genetic endowment and educational attainment, broadly conceived. The finding is that PGSs (polygenic scores) are (slightly) less predictive of educational attainment in later cohorts.

This isn’t that surprising, given educational inflation – over time, higher percentages of the population achieve any given level of educational attainment. In addition, as shown in Table 3 and mentioned in the Discussion section, this decline in importance of genetic endowment is restricted only to the ‘lower half of the educational distribution’. In contrast, genetic endowment (measured by PGSs) has become even more important across cohorts in predicting the ‘transition from a completed college degree to graduate education’ (534). Isn’t this what we’d expect to happen as the level of educational attainment at the lower half of the distribution becomes increasingly decoupled from cognitive ability?

H&M argued that cognitive ability is becoming more important in determining one’s life chances. The authors of this paper don’t actually test this hypothesis. They instead create polygenic scores *of educational attainment* (!) rather than cognitive ability – based on the GWAS of Rietveld et al. (2013) – and find that genetic predictors of *educational attainment* become (slightly) less predictive of educational attainment, on average, i.e. for high school and college. But again, they also report that the association of this genetic correlate (of educational attainment) and educational attainment has actually become stronger for transitions into graduate and professional schools from college.

If I’m not mistaken, the association between cognitive ability (as measured say by standardized tests, SAT, ACT, GRE, AFQT and NEA reports on reading and math ability) and educational attainment has weakened over time. It is possible that cognitive ability is becoming increasingly salient in determining SES as H&M maintain, and at the same time, educational attainment is becoming less salient, simply because the relationship between cognitive ability and educational attainment is becoming weaker. In other words, educational attainment, at least at the lower levels, is less salient in determining relative status. ...

Regarding fertility and dysgenic trends, see this more recent paper from the DeCode collaboration in Iceland, which reaches much stronger conclusions in agreement with H&M.

See also Conley's new book Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals about Ourselves, Our History, and the Future.

Conley, Steve Pinker, and I were on a 92nd Street Y panel together in 2016.

Ratchets Within Ratchets

For those interested in political philosophy, or Trump's travel ban, I recommend this discussion on Scott Aaronson's blog, which features a commenter calling himself Boldmug (see also Bannon and Moldbug in the news recently ;-)

Both Scott and Boldmug seem to agree that scientific/technological progress is a positive ratchet caught within a negative ratchet of societal and political decay.

Boldmug Says:
Comment #181 January 27th, 2017 at 5:26 pm

Scott: An interesting term, “ratchet of progress.” Nature is full of ratchets. But ratchets of progress — extropic ratchets — are the exceptional case. Most ratchets are entropic ratchets, ratchets of decay.

You happen to live inside the ratchet of progress that is science and engineering. That ratchet produces beautiful wonders like seedless watermelons. It’s true that Talleyrand said, “no one who remembers the sweetness of life before the Revolution can even imagine it,” but even Louis XIV had to spit the seeds out of his watermelons.

This ratchet is 400 to 2400 years old, depending on how you count. The powers and ideologies that be are very good at taking credit for science and engineering, though it is much older than any of them. It is a powerful ratchet — not even the Soviet system could kill or corrupt science entirely, although it’s always the least political fields, like math and physics, that do the best.

But most ratchets are entropic ratchets of decay. The powers that be don’t teach you to see the ratchets of decay. You have to look for them with your own eyes.

The scientists and engineers who created the Antikythera mechanism lived inside a ratchet of progress. But that ratchet of progress lived inside a ratchet of decay, which is why we didn’t have an industrial revolution in 100BC. Instead we had war, tyranny, stagnation and (a few hundred years later) collapse.

Lucio Russo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Russo) wrote an interesting, if perhaps a little overstated, book, on the Hellenistic (300-150BC, not to be confused with the Hellenic era proper) golden age of science. We really have no way of knowing how close to a scientific revolution the Alexandrians came. But it was political failure, not scientific failure, that destroyed their world. The ratchet of progress was inside a ratchet of decay. ...

It doesn't appear that Scott responded to this dig by Boldmug:

Boldmug Says:
Comment #153 January 27th, 2017 at 11:51 am

... Coincidentally, the latter is the side [THE LEFT] whose Jedi mind tricks are so strong, they almost persuaded someone with a 160 IQ to castrate himself.

And the Enlightenment? You mean the Enlightenment that guillotined Lavoisier? “The Republic has no need of savants.” Add 1789 and even 1641 to that list. Why would a savant pick Praisegod Barebones over Prince Rupert?

You might notice that in our dear modern world, whose quantum cryptography and seedless watermelons are so excellent, “the Republic has no need of savants” is out there still. Know anyone working on human genetics? ...

Don't believe in societal decay? Read this recent tour-de-force paper by DeCode researchers in Iceland, who have established beyond doubt the (long-term) dysgenic nature of modern society:

Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)

Epidemiological and genetic association studies show that genetics play an important role in the attainment of education. Here, we investigate the effect of this genetic component on the reproductive history of 109,120 Icelanders and the consequent impact on the gene pool over time. We show that an educational attainment polygenic score, POLYEDU, constructed from results of a recent study is associated with delayed reproduction (P < 10^(−100)) and fewer children overall. The effect is stronger for women and remains highly significant after adjusting for educational attainment. Based on 129,808 Icelanders born between 1910 and 1990, we find that the average POLYEDU has been declining at a rate of ∼0.010 standard units per decade, which is substantial on an evolutionary timescale. Most importantly, because POLYEDU only captures a fraction of the overall underlying genetic component the latter could be declining at a rate that is two to three times faster.

Note: these "educational attainment" variants are mostly variants which influence cognitive ability.

From the Discussion section of the paper:

... The main message here is that the human race is genetically far from being stagnant with respect to one of its most important traits. It is remarkable to report changes in POLYEDU that are measurable across the several decades covered by this study. In evolutionary time, this is a blink of an eye. However, if this trend persists over many centuries, the impact could be profound.

Technically Sweet

Regular readers will know that I've been interested in the so-called Teller-Ulam mechanism used in thermonuclear bombs. Recently I read Kenneth Ford's memoir Building the H Bomb: A Personal History. Ford was a student of John Wheeler, who brought him to Los Alamos to work on the H-bomb project. This led me to look again at Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of Hydrogen Bomb. There is quite a lot of interesting material in these two books on the specific contributions of Ulam and Teller, and whether the Soviets came up with the idea themselves, or had help from spycraft. See also Sakharov's Third Idea and F > L > P > S.

The power of a megaton device is described below by a witness to the Soviet test.

The Soviet Union tested a two-stage, lithium-deuteride-fueled thermonuclear device on November 22, 1955, dropping it from a Tu-16 bomber to minimize fallout. It yielded 1.6 megatons, a yield deliberately reduced for the Semipalatinsk test from its design yield of 3 MT. According to Yuri Romanov, Andrei Sakharov and Yakov Zeldovich worked out the Teller-Ulam configuration in conversations together in early spring 1954, independently of the US development. “I recall how Andrei Dmitrievich gathered the young associates in his tiny office,” Romanov writes, “… and began talking about the amazing ability of materials with a high atomic number to be an excellent reflector of high-intensity, short-pulse radiation.” ...

Victor Adamsky remembers the shock wave from the new thermonuclear racing across the steppe toward the observers. “It was a front of moving air that you could see that differed in quality from the air before and after. It came, it was really terrible; the grass was covered with frost and the moving front thawed it, you felt it melting as it approached you.” Igor Kurchatov walked in to ground zero with Yuli Khariton after the test and was horrified to see the earth cratered even though the bomb had detonated above ten thousand feet. “That was such a terrible, monstrous sight,” he told Anatoli Alexandrov when he returned to Moscow. “That weapon must not be allowed ever to be used.”

The Teller-Ulam design uses radiation pressure (reflected photons) from a spherical fission bomb to compress the thermonuclear fuel. The design is (to quote Oppenheimer) "technically sweet" -- a glance at the diagram below should convince anyone who understands geometrical optics!

In discussions of human genetic engineering (clearly a potentially dangerous future technology), the analogy with nuclear weapons sometimes arises: what role do moral issues play in the development of new technologies with the potential to affect the future of humanity? In my opinion, genetic engineering of humans carries nothing like the existential risk of arsenals of Teller-Ulam devices. Genomic consequences will play out over long (generational) timescales, leaving room for us to assess outcomes and adapt accordingly. (In comparison, genetic modification of viruses, which could lead to pandemics, seems much more dangerous.)

It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. -- Oppenheimer on the Teller-Ulam design for the H-bomb.

What is technically sweet about genomics? (1) the approximate additivity (linearity) of the genetic architecture of key traits such as human intelligence (2) the huge amounts of extant variance in the human population, enabling large improvements (3) matrices of human genomes are good compressed sensors, and one can estimate how much data is required to "solve" the genetic architecture of complex traits. See, e.g., Genius (Nautilus Magazine) and Genetic architecture and predictive modeling of quantitative traits.

More excerpts from Dark Sun below.

Enthusiasts of trans-generational epigenetics would do well to remember the danger of cognitive bias and the lesson of Lysenko. Marxian notions of heredity are dangerous because, although scientifically incorrect, they appeal to our egalitarian desires.

A commission arrived in Sarov one day to make sure everyone agreed with Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko's Marxian notions of heredity, which Stalin had endorsed. Sakharov expressed his belief in Mendelian genetics instead. The commission let the heresy pass, he writes, because of his “position and reputation at the Installation,” but the outspoken experimentalist Lev Altshuler, who similarly repudiated Lysenko, did not fare so well ...

The transmission of crucial memes from Szilard to Sakharov, across the Iron Curtain.

Andrei Sakharov stopped by Victor Adamsky's office at Sarov one day in 1961 to show him a story. It was Leo Szilard's short fiction “My Trial as a War Criminal,” one chapter of his book The Voice of the Dolphins, published that year in the US. “I'm not strong in English,” Adamsky says, “but I tried to read it through. A number of us discussed it. It was about a war between the USSR and the USA, a very devastating one, which brought victory to the USSR. Szilard and a number of other physicists are put under arrest and then face the court as war criminals for having created weapons of mass destruction. Neither they nor their lawyers could make up a cogent proof of their innocence. We were amazed by this paradox. You can't get away from the fact that we were developing weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was necessary. Such was our inner conviction. But still the moral aspect of it would not let Andrei Dmitrievich and some of us live in peace.” So the visionary Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who first conceived of a nuclear chain reaction crossing a London street on a gray Depression morning in 1933, delivered a note in a bottle to a secret Soviet laboratory that contributed to Andrei Sakharov's courageous work of protest that helped bring the US-Soviet nuclear arms race to an end.

Peter Visscher: Genomics, Big Data, Medicine, and Complex Traits

Another good talk from the Genomics, Big Data, and Medicine Seminar Series at the Icahn School of Medicine (Mt. Sinai). Peter starts his talk by discussing height as a classical model trait, giving credit to Galton for first investigating heritability and related ideas, and noting the approximate additivity of genetic effects. @16min, state of the art genomic prediction of height from GIANT collaboration.

Interestingly, Visscher is Dutch for Fisher -- as in Ronald Fisher (the father of population genetics and early pioneer in statistics).

See Maxwell's demon and genetic engineering.

Ronald Fisher on positive alleles for intelligence, in Mendelism and Biometry (1911):

Suppose we knew, for example, 20 pairs of mental characters [loci in the genome]. These would combine in over a million pure mental types; [some of] these would naturally occur rather less frequently than once in a billion; or in a country like England about once in 20,000 generations [assuming the positive variants are somewhat rare]; it will give some idea as to the excellence of the best of these types when we consider that the Englishmen from Shakespeare to Darwin have occurred within 10 generations; the thought of a race of men combining the illustrious qualities of these giants, and breeding true to them, is almost too overwhelming, but such a race will inevitably arise in whatever country first sees the inheritance of mental characters elucidated.

DNA Dreams at Harvard

This is a panel discussion of the documentary film DNA Dreams (see below), about BGI and its Cognitive Genomics Lab.

DNA DREAMS

Moderator: Dr. Evelynn Hammonds, Director of the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science

Panelists include: (L to R)
1. George Church, Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
2. Bregjte van der Haak, Filmmaker
3. Arthur Kleinman, Director of the Harvard University Asia Center and Professor of Anthropology and Medical Anthropology at Harvard University
4. Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor, Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University

Peter Galison is dismissive of "single parameter" measures of cognitive ability. George Church replies quite effectively. Certainly anyone who has thought seriously about IQ or g knows that it is only a crude measure of (compressed approximation to) a multi-dimensional set of mental abilities. I wonder how Peter would react to learning that his grandchild would be born with a mutation depressing the meaningless "single parameter" in question to an SD below normal. Would he just shrug it off as unimportant?

I believe this is the entire documentary:

What's New Since Montagu?

I wrote this to help a journalist who is trying to understand the current controversy over A Troubled Inheritance, the new book by NYTimes genetics correspondent Nicholas Wade. (Link above goes to earlier discussion on this blog, with additional useful links and figures.)

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu advanced the idea that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality. For Wade, Montagu is a foil against which to benchmark recent advances in human genomics.

Wade: ... So I decided that I would write a book that explained what we know about race and what the consequences might be, and I think Montagu made a terrible mistake, though I share his motives.

Note the discussion below avoids using the term "race" and focuses instead on groups of humans that share ancestry. The degree of sharing can now be directly measured through genotypes.

What's New Since Montagu?

Two modern humans differ at about 1 in 1000 loci (out of ~ 3 billion in the human genome). There are a few million differences between any two individuals across their entire genome.

A common argument is that 99.9 percent genetic similarity cannot leave room for "consequential" differences. But modern humans and Neanderthals are almost as similar (~ 99.8 percent; we have high accuracy sequences now for Neanderthals), and there are significant differences between us and them: both physical and cognitive. However, because humans and Neanderthals are known to have interbred, we are still part of the same species. (Would it be fair to refer to them as a separate "race"? Is the modern-Neanderthal difference merely a social construct?) Furthermore, this 0.1 percent genetic variation accounts for human diversity encompassing Confucius, Einstein, Shaq and Shakespeare.

Genetic variation is patterned -- two individuals who trace their ancestry to the same geographical region (e.g., two Japanese) will have about 15 percent fewer total differences between them than if we were to compare individuals from widely separated ancestries (e.g., a Nigerian and a Japanese). This means hundreds of thousands of fewer differences between individuals from the same group than for two randomly selected people from different groups. 

Gene variants (alleles) which are common in one population (e.g., 90 percent of Japanese have version A) can be rare in another (e.g., only 20 percent of Nigerians have version A). Differences in allele frequencies are correlated across populations. From these correlations one can easily identify a genome (or even a small chunk of DNA as long as it includes many alleles) as belonging to a particular ancestral group. To oversimplify: just ask whether the DNA chunk in question has mostly the variants that are common in one group as opposed to another. Even if the differences in allele frequency are small -- e.g., allele X is 62 percent likely in Japanese, versus 57 percent likely in Nigerians -- once we consider thousands of such alleles the statistical signal becomes apparent. Each individual (or chunk of DNA) can be associated with a particular ancestral group.

Is this genetic difference consequential? Does it make two Nigerians more similar, on average, to each other than to a random European? Obviously, on some superficial phenotypes such as skin color or nose shape, the answer is yes.

But what about more complicated traits, such as height or cognitive ability or personality? All of these are known to be significantly heritable, through twin and adoption studies, as well as more modern methods.

We can't answer the question without understanding the specific genetic architecture of the trait. For example, are alleles that slightly increase height more common in one group than another? We need to know exactly which alleles affect height... But this is challenging as the traits I listed are almost certainly controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes. Could population averages on these traits differ between groups, due to differences in allele frequencies? I know of no argument, taking into account the information above, showing that they could not.

In fact, in the case of height we are close to answering the question. We have identified hundreds of loci correlated to height. Detailed analysis suggests that the difference in average height between N and S Europeans (about one population SD, or a couple of inches) is partially genetic (N Europeans, on average, have a larger number of height increasing alleles than S Europeans), due to different selection pressures that the populations experienced in the recent past (i.e., past 10k years).

Many who argue on Montagu's side hold the prior belief that the ~ 50k years of isolation between continental populations is not enough time for differential selection to produce group differences, particularly in complex traits governed by many loci. This is of course a quantitative question depending on strength of selection in different environments. The new results on height should cause them to reconsider their priors.

It is fair to say that results on height, as well as on simpler traits such as lactose or altitude tolerance, are consistent with Wade's theme that evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.

Further extrapolation to behavioral and cognitive traits will require more data, but:

1) The question is scientific -- it can be answered with known methods. (I estimate of order millions of genotype-phenotype pairs will allow us to extract the genetic architecture of complex traits like cognitive ability -- perhaps sometime in the coming decade.)

2) There is no a priori argument, given what we currently know, that such differences cannot exist. (Cf. Neanderthals!) Note this is NOT an argument that differences exist -- merely that they might, and that we cannot exclude the possibility.

An honest Ashley Montagu would have to concede points 1 and 2 above.

The second part of A Troublesome Inheritance covers controversial topics such as genetic group differences in behavioral and cognitive predispositions, and their societal implications. Wade is mostly careful to present these as speculative hypotheses, but nevertheless his advocacy leaves him vulnerable to easy attack. What I have summarized above are the incontestable (albeit, in some circles, perhaps still controversial and poorly understood) new results that have accumulated through the last decade of genomic research.

See also Recent human evolution: European height and The Neanderthal Problem.

Note Added: Distinguished evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has written a review in The New York Review of Books which I find quite similar to mine.

There was some back and forth between Razib Khan, Orr and Jerry Coyne. I added the comment below.

My take on the book is similar to that of Orr/Coyne: does a decent job of explaining population structure; too much speculation in the second part.

However, I think Orr/Coyne/Wade all miss the most interesting piece of science regarding strength of recent selection: evidence that the N-S height gradient (about 1 SD of difference between the two regions) in Europeans is due to selection pressure. That would constitute an example of fairly strong (in the context of the debate over group differences in humans) selection pressure acting over relatively short periods of time (~ 10 kya or less). I would think this result, if it holds up, might require significant updating of priors for certain people. It also provides a good example of how science in this area should be done: observed phenotype group difference, large data sets (GIANT) teasing out the genetic architecture, tests for selection on associated genetic variants.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/05/whats-new-since-montagu.html
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/08/recent-human-evolution-european-height.html

Another point, for the cognoscenti: Wade does a good job explaining the difference between soft and hard sweeps. Orr notes that small adjustments of allele frequencies is one of the primary mechanisms for evolutionary change (so nothing new in Wade’s discussion; goes all the way back to Fisher), but many many readers, even biologists who aren’t in population genetics, don’t understand this point very well. So reading that section in the book would increase understanding for a large number of people.

Nicholas Wade interview: A Troublesome Inheritance

Leonard Lopate interviews Nicholas Wade (veteran genetics correspondent for the NYTimes) about his new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The interview is slow at first but the second half is good.



Update: Another interview (May 9), with CBC, that gets right to the point regarding "social construction" -- the convenient but incorrect legacy of anthropologist Ashley Montagu (Israel Ehrenberg). The second guest, Stanford anthropologist Duana Fullwiley, foreshadows the counterattack on Wade.

See also this well-written essay in Time, adapted from the book.


I received a copy of A Troublesome Inheritance from the publisher. My initial impressions:

(1) The first part of the book covers well-established science concerning the genetic clustering of human populations. Some of the results will be surprising to those who have not followed the last 10 years of progress in genomics. See, e.g., here and here for my thoughts on this subject.

(2) The second part of the book covers controversial topics such as genetic group differences in behavioral and cognitive predispositions. Wade is mostly careful to present these as speculative hypotheses, but nevertheless his advocacy leaves him vulnerable to easy attack.

It will be interesting to see how this book, by a prominent science writer (indeed, the chief genetics correspondent for the paper of record), is received by the intelligentsia, the punditocracy, and actual scientists.

Additional remarks:

 

Below I have excerpted from the first link in (1) above, a post I originally wrote in 2007. I think these remarks are quite relevant to Wade's new book; note specific comments in brackets [ ... ].

... Two groups that form distinct [ genetic ] clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences. [ One does not require a more precise definition of "races" to get immediately to the thorny questions: two groups that differ in allele frequencies may differ statistically in phenotype! ]

This leads us to two very different possibilities in human genetic variation:

Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.

Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.

... As scientists, we don't know whether H1 or H2 is correct, but given the revolution in biotechnology, we will eventually. Let me reiterate, before someone labels me a racist: we don't know with high confidence whether H1 or H2 is correct.

... it is important to note that group differences are statistical in nature and do not imply anything definitive about a particular individual. Rather than rely on the scientifically unsupported claim that we are all equal, it would be better to emphasize that we all have inalienable human rights regardless of our abilities or genetic makeup. [ Consider individuals, who are clearly unequal in their gifts: greater abilities should not confer greater rights! ]

... Clustering makes it possible that H2 is correct, because the alleles (genetic variants) affecting a particular phenotype will tend to have different frequencies in different groups. The average value of the trait might or might not be the same in different groups. In the case of height, enough is known to suggest that variants which lead to increased height are more frequent in northern Europe than in the south, and there is evidence that this is due to selection, not drift. [ i.e., this is evidence of recent selection driving group differences in a complex trait, controlled by thousands of loci. Wade: “Human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.” ]

... I think it's especially important to be epistemologically careful in thinking about these matters, because of our difficult history with race. [ By articulating so many speculative theories in the second part of his book, Wade risks being perceived as not careful. ]

... I would much rather live in a world where H1 is true and H2 false. But my preference alone does not make it so. (I would also much rather live in a universe created by a loving God, and in which I and my children have eternal souls; not a cruel Darwinian universe in which our species arose merely by chance. But my preference does not make it so.)

Learning can hurt

This essay, from 2007, summarizes how progress in genomics came to confront convenient but incorrect views on the genetic clustering of human populations. The vast majority of people, even scientists, are still confused about this subject. See also Human genetic variation, Fst and Lewontin's fallacy in pictures.

The flipside of serendipity: human genetics rediscovers race

... In this paper I investigate the recent re-emergence of genetic race in more detail, and endeavour to ascertain how, after a half-century hiatus, a young team of population geneticists could casually rediscover race in 2002. Was it happenstance? Or was it opportune timing? My tentative conclusions are: (a) the flipside of serendipity is sociopolitical context; and (b) in the first few years of the new millennium, on the face of it, the time was indeed ripe for genetic race to re-emerge within the scientific mainstream.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A CLUSTER ANALYSIS ...

'We have sequenced the genome of three females and two males, who have identified themselves as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American ... to help illustrate that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis. In the five Celera genomes, there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another.'--J Craig Venter, White House press conference, June 2000. (4)

Craig Venter was the 'maverick' geneticist who founded Celera Genomics--a private biotech company that, in the late 1990s, took on a trans-national network of publicly and privately funded researchers in a frantic race to sequence the human genome. In June 2000, at the White House press conference that heralded the completion of the 'first assembly' of the genome, standing next to his public-sector adversary Francis Collins, United States President Bill Clinton, and (via satellite feed) United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a triumphal moment for Big Science and liberal humanism Venter announced: 'the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.'

In saying this, he reaffirmed evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin's oft-cited claim that racial classification is of 'virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance'. (5) He also echoed a gaggle of other geneticists and an army of anthropologists who, since the middle of the twentieth century, have similarly sought to deny that the 'race concept' has any basis in biology. In short, he took up what might be termed the 'race as social construct' position--a position that has come to function as a default setting within the social sciences in recent decades. Never mind that his assertion was based on an analysis of only five individual genomes and thus a statistical fallacy; the important thing was that it befitted the hyperbole of the occasion and had the aura of incontrovertible truth.

[[ Who could have possibly accepted these results as decisive? See Bounded Cognition. ]]

Over the next few years the incontrovertibility of the 'race as social construct' position began to erode. Just four years after Venter's speech, in the pages of a Nature genetics supplement dedicated to the issue of race in genomics, Francis Collins--who had shared both podium and Time magazine cover with Venter on that aforementioned momentous day--offered this cautious qualification: 'As ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection.' (6)

... Collins ... is the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, a renowned medical genetics researcher, and by all accounts not a racist. So why is a distinguished geneticist, not some racist crackpot on the margins of academia, suddenly making the claim: 'it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection'? What happened in those few short years that separate Venter's exultant assertion and Collins's wary disclaimer?

Ostensibly, the answer to these questions can be found in Collins's paper, for he cites evidence to support his claim: a population genetics study conducted by Noah Rosenberg and his team of researchers that was published in Science in December 2002. Drawing on samples from the Human Genome Diversity Cell Line Panel, (8) these researchers investigated the 'correspondence of predefined groups with those inferred from individual multilocus genotypes'. (9) They used a complex computer algorithm to sort 1,064 genome samples, from fifty-two different populations, on the basis of 4,199 different alleles, at 377 highly variable 'junk-DNA' loci, into varying numbers of statistically significant genetic clusters, and then compared the clusters with the geographical origins of the populations from which they were drawn. Put simply, they took the labels off the samples and tried to see if the computer could sort them back into meaningful groups based solely on their genetic similarities.

They found that 'predefined labels' (such as 'Yoruba', 'Italian' or 'Japanese') were 'highly informative about membership in genetic clusters'. (10) Further, when asked to identify five clusters, the computer grouped the samples into sets roughly corresponding to five geographical regions: (i) sub-Saharan Africa, (ii) Europe and West Asia, (iii) East Asia, (iv) Oceania, and (v) the Americas (see the row marked 'K=5' in Figure 1 below for a graphical representation of these clusters). Curiously, these regions are roughly geographically concordant to those occupied by the 'black', 'white', 'yellow', 'tawny' and 'copper-coloured' 'varieties' outlined in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's seminal eighteenth-century racial typology. (11)

These results should have come as no surprise to most population geneticists, as it had long been assumed that human groups separated by physical, environmental, linguistic, and/or cultural barriers would display some degree of genetic differentiation. (12) Nonetheless, they were quite significant, as it was the first time that human populations had been comprehensively shown to cluster together on the basis of genetic likeness in a 'blind' test.

Still, Rosenberg and his colleagues were relatively circumspect in their conclusions. Their point was not to show that old anthropological conceptions of race are genetically 'real', but to argue that differentiating between human populations is both methodologically and statistically valid, and that such distinctions can be legitimately used for tracing the origins and migrations of peoples, as well as for medical and epidemiological purposes.

The words 'race' and 'ethnicity' never appeared in their paper, only 'population' and 'ancestry', and they were careful to choose neutral colours to code the continental clusters they identified--sub-Saharan Africa was orange, Europe and West Asia pale-blue, East Asia pink, Oceania green, and the Americas purple (not black, white, yellow, tawny and copper-coloured). Here they seemingly followed a convention established by the father of human population genetics and the prime mover behind the Human Genome Diversity Project, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, whose co-authored magnum opus, The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994, abridged 2006), featured a colour-coded atlas on its cover (Figure 2), with the caption: 'Four major ethnic regions are shown. Africans are yellow, Australians red, [Mongoloids blue] and Caucasoids green.' (13) A reviewer from Time magazine described Cavalli-Sforza's book as 'a landmark global study' that 'flattens The Bell Curve, proving that racial differences are only skin deep.' (14) Similarly, the Rosenberg study was lauded for its 'humanitarian' findings and adjudged 'paper of the year' by The Lancet in 2003. (15)

On the surface the consensus was that nothing much had changed. Population genetics had proven racial differences were only 'skin deep', and the Rosenberg findings only served to further confirm this incontrovertible fact. Everyone was content to repeat the familiar mantra: 'no race here ... nothing to look at ... move along'. However, beneath the 'race as social construct' ideological edifice a fuse had been lit and a 'race as biological reality' powder keg was about to go off.

THE MESSY FALLOUT

Even before the Rosenberg paper appeared, a group of belligerent geneticists headed up by Neil Risch from Stanford University had published an opinion piece in Genome Biology defending 'the validity of race/ethnicity categories for biomedical and genetic research' on the basis of cluster analyses similar to that used by the Rosenberg study.

[[ See Neil Risch, Portrait of a mathematical geneticist. ]]

The following year A W F Edwards, who had pioneered the statistical techniques behind cluster analysis with Cavalli-Sforza in the 1960s, penned a curt refutation of Lewontin's 1972 claim about the insignificance of racial classification, citing the Rosenberg study to buttress his argument. (17)

Following on from Edwards's assault, over the next few years several review essays appeared in major journals, (18) and the issue exploded onto the pages of the major broadsheets. Two articles from The New York Times tell the story of this re-emergence quite well: in August 2000 the headline read, 'Do races differ? Not really, genes show', with the author quoting Venter and others; (19) by July 2006 another headline read, 'Imperfect, imprecise but useful: Your race', and the article discussed the utility of racial classifications for biomedical research. (20)

A further twist in the plot of this recent race potboiler began on 14 March 2005, when evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi published a now infamous op-ed piece, again in The New York Times (seemingly the arbiter of all things genetic), entitled 'A family tree in every gene'. (21) Taking up the Rosenberg study bait, he heralded their findings as suggesting: 'the consensus about social constructs was unravelling', and 'looked at the right way, the genetic data show that races clearly do exist.' (22) Further, he celebrated new advances in genetics that will soon mean, 'we shall no longer gawp ignorantly at the gallery [of racial differences]; we shall be able to name the painters.' (23)

Of course, more than a few people took exception to this talk of 'genetic painters' and 'racial galleries', and Leroi's article prompted a swift multi-pronged rebuttal. Within a month the US Social Science Research Council (SSCR) had sponsored a web forum collecting together critical responses from many of the usual 'social construct' suspects, including Alan Goodman, Evelynn Hammonds, Joseph Graves, Ruth Hubbard, Richard Lewontin and Jonathan Marks (many of whom also appeared in the 2003 PBS documentary series 'Race--the Power of an Illusion'). (24)

Labouring valiantly to plug the holes emerging in the epistemic dyke separating old race pseudoscience from modern human genetics, these ageing anti-race activists accused Leroi of 'reifying' race, and argued that race is most certainly not a biological category but rather an all-too-real social category that should be kept as far away as possible from the objective realm of science. ...


... This is what more sophisticated constructivists mean when they say race is a social construct--that the social and political aspects of race cannot easily be disentangled from the biological. (28) However, some constructivists want to go as far as to suggest that there is no biological dimension to race at all, with Richard Lewontin being a notorious culprit. Lewontin's research in the 1970s did not show that racial classifications were genetically insignificant, only that differences between racial groups were less significant than within groups. (29) His denial of the genetic significance of race is a non sequitur.

Putting aside Lewontin's fallacy, the major mistakes that unsophisticated social constructivists make are: (a) to suggest that being bound up with social and political concerns renders race 'unscientific' (as if scientific knowledge about human subjects could ever be separated from society and politics); and (b) to believe that by replacing race with the term population we can somehow escape this problem. The latter move just 'purifies' the concept of race, allowing geneticists to investigate racial groups such as 'Yoruba', 'Japanese', 'Caucasoid' or 'Australian' under the rubric of population, whilst denying that their research has anything to do with race. ...